hexcat

goodbye, microsoft

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 23:46:23 -0400

I migrated all my repositories over to codeberg from github following a souring I’ve experienced with microsoft products. In short, I don’t like the user experience or the direction the company is going. They’re an industry hegemon so I have to keep some accounts open, but this migration was another step to minimize my presence in places I’d rather not be.

The Good: I’ve had a lot of fun refactoring my website and changing static site generators from Jekyll to Hugo. The refactor allowed me to clear up some tech debt which was haunting me. I commingled a lot of data, code, and presentation on the old website that would have been better separated. I developed the Mondriaan theme which helped me consider my choices with more gravity since the theme should be website agnostic. The separation simplifies website maintenance and allows me to upload more frequently.

270 Gyoza

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 03:37:28 -0400

Ingredients:

1 napa cabbage
6lbs of ground pork
6 packages of gyoza dumpling wrappers (~45 each totaling 270)
6 spring onions
1lb of peeled garlic (1 shallow tub from HMart)
1 large ginger

Instructions:

Dice the entire head of cabbage
Place the cabbage into a cloth lined strainer that sits in a bowl
Salt the cabbage thoroughly
Peel the ginger
Mince the spring onions, garlic, and ginger. Set aside
Wrap the cabbage up in the cloth, twisting the cloth and expressing the remaining water from the cabbage.
Mix all filling ingredients until evenly incorporated
Salt and pepper to taste (Usually I’ll cook test portions of the filling to make sure it’s seasoned properly)

Wrappers:

Rum Cup

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 03:07:08 -0400

Ingredients:

Instructions:

Mix 1 parts Rum and 1 parts Cup
Enjoy

retopology

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 05:19:28 -0400

I spent this weekend refamiliarizing myself with Blender. I learned some concepts about retopology and tried to apply them to a model of a sci-fi astronaut I bought online. Because the model was so intricate, doing it manually was tedious and I stopped after the helmet. Afterwards, I looked into some automated features but wasn’t pleased with the fidelity they gave me at similar poly counts. The requirements for this model are tricky; it’s getting printed at 28mm scale so finer details don’t matter, but I’d like to pose it before printing so it needs retopology. My current plan is to give the retopology tool a really high polygon budget, exceeding that of the sculpted model if needed. I can then rig and pose this model without any weird artifacts. Before exporting the model I would apply a decimate modifier to bring the poly count, and file size, down. The decimation shouldn’t diminish the print quality. I expect to wrap this up and get my prints returned some time this month. I’ll upload a comparison below.

baud rate

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 04:56:25 -0400

Last year I bought a Cisco Catalyst 2960X switch from the MIT tech swapfest (really fun flea market hosted in a parking garage by the MIT radio club). That was in anticipation for setting up a homelab after I moved into my own apartment. After about a year of disuse I finally got to tinker with the switch now that I’ve used all the ethernet ports on my router.

Getting the switch operational was a bit of an undertaking. The Catalyst is almost 10 years old, and its security definitely reflects that (Telnet support, TLS 1.0 on the web portal, RSA+SHA1 SSH cipher suites). Cisco offers updates on their website and I naively thought that upgrading would fix all my security issues. After updating, I found that none of the aforementioned issues were fixed. Most switches, this one included, use Broadcom integrated circuits which come with licensing fees that open source communities can’t pay. This means that flashing custom firmware onto the switch is out of the question. This was a bit disappointing.

the sword of damocles

Thu, 13 Nov 2025 00:21:18 -0400

Postmortem for a RAID migration on my Dell Poweredge R320 lovingly referred to as ‘The Sword of Damocles’.

It sits above my desk and it just barely grazes my hair when I stand up.

Before

I originally stood the server up with 2 1TB drives in a RAID 0 (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) while waiting for the rest of my hard drive bays in the mail. A hard drive failed during this time and since RAID 0 is only striping, the RAID array could not be rebuilt and data was lost.

polestar

Sat, 04 Oct 2025 01:14:12 -0400

2026-07-02: Embedded images were intentionally left broken upon migrating the server to reduce filesize. Missing images show up as [image][image] on this post. I’m still working on this project and intend to find a better way to showcase this.

Video game project in the same near-future Europa setting from my role playing game.

I hope to teach myself:

Game development
The Godot game engine
Rust by way of godot-rust
Jerry Tessendorf’s model for real-time ocean surface simulation
GIS and GIS mapping tools (little showcase in the map window)
AIS and NMEA message broadcasts

I’m also looking into combining GIS mapping with NOAA satellite imagery, per the suggestion of a friend. I am currently making an antenna and want to start collecting weather imagery with my RTL-SDR.

polestar:omum

Sat, 04 Oct 2025 01:10:07 -0400

This is a roleplaying game I homebrewed over a couple of weeks. The appeal to this system are the following: simple progression, fast combat, and naval combat rules. I think the naval combat rules are intriguing because movement is abstracted, freeing players from counting hex squares.

There is an accompanying setting to Polestar:OMUM, but it is largely accessory and doesn’t have much influence on the game rules.

For the future:

kodo

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 13:51:45 -0400

I had the privilege of seeing KODŌ at the Boston Symphony Hall on March 9th. I had a wonderful time watching the drum performance and was moved by some of the last pieces. Towards the end of the show, one performer walked out onto stage and began playing the giant drum that sat towards the back of the stage. He was alone and wearing just a cloth. After a couple minutes of his solo, the drum began responding to his beats. A reward for his efforts.

optical character recognition

Fri, 30 Aug 2024 20:26:16 -0400

An excerpt from a project I completed for my machine learning class

Introduction:

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is the process of identifying printed or handwritten characters and digitizing them. The technology is mostly used for the preservation of historical documents and digitizing the handwritten addresses on letters travelling through the postal service. Many techniques exist, including usage of neural networks, but this project will remain in the boundaries of what was covered in class.

letting projects die

Wed, 24 Jul 2024 19:18:52 -0400

Mentally I need to be able to ditch projects and free the space in my mind to think about other things. I’m coming around to this idea, but previously I would never abandon a project and they would languish in my head forever. I didn’t accept that my values or interests could change, so whatever is started must be finished. Most of these were personal projects for fun, they shouldn’t make me miserable.

chatgpt asvab

Sun, 17 Mar 2024 02:40:26 -0400

I fed some asvab questions into chatGPT 3.5 and it got all of the questions correct, which isn’t surprising. I was unable to test GPT against the “Assembling Objects” since it no longer accepts image uploads from free users, but it would be cool to find out how it would answer a question like this:

I wonder if it reads the features in an image and then converts it into prompt that it feeds itself. My prompting skills are severely lacking, but my letter prompt explores this premise:

clock puzzle

Wed, 14 Feb 2024 05:08:26 -0400

I showed my website to my parents some time back. They seemed superficially interested, but there wasn’t anything here to grab their curiosity. The projects tab is nice for technical people that know what github is, but I think they would have liked to see something tangible from the code I’ve written (or a description, because some of the names are apocryphal).

Enter the Clock Puzzle

I’ll revisit the clock puzzle for this purpose and see if I can embed a web assembly clock puzzle onto the website itself.

crab language

Wed, 31 Jan 2024 00:15:16 -0500

date: 2024-02-14 05:08:26

I completed my first project in Rust!

I basically implemented a copy of Steam Input, replacing their virtual keyboard with a radial keyboard. I encountered many design challenges and have hopefully ironed out most of the kinks. You can read about the problems I encountered on the wiki page of the repo.

All of my schooling was in Java, so learning another explicitly-typed language wasn’t difficult. I’m still learning to make full use of borrowing and immutability.

anemone

Mon, 22 Jan 2024 20:31:11 -0500

Single Hoo Exploring

Zemer Peled created Single Hoo Exploring out of porcelain shards in the shape of a sea anemone. She captured the anemone’s form elegantly such that Single Hoo wouldn’t look out of place on the sea floor among its organic siblings. Upon first inspection, this art piece explores the limits of the ceramic medium since it was made in such an atypical manner. The rough texture of the anemone’s body makes it look as if the sculpture was created out of discarded and broken pieces from a pottery studio, much unlike anything else on display in the room. From viewing this piece alone, Ms. Peled’s passion and appreciation for the natural world is immediately apparent. Single Hoo possesses other dimensions beyond exploration of porcelain medium, revealing human’s inability to master nature and the fragility of nature. In many ways, the statue is identical to the sea anemone. Both share this organic form and defensive capability; one with sharp glass and another with stinging tentacles. Both are equally fragile; the statue must be kept safe from shattering and the anemone is dependent on the environment in which its anchored. The anemone can live on after individual death through its offspring, yet the statue breaks and is not remade without the guided hand of Zemer. The anemone contributes and depends on an ecosystem for its robustness. Humans may be able to adapt quicker than the anemone but ultimately rely on the same ecosystem’s health. Unlike the statue, anemones and humans can not live within the confines of a glass box. Single Hoo Exploring reminds those who see it to be good stewards and live in harmony with nature. Living in opposition to nature ensures that we will not be remade after shattering like a porcelain statue.

plaintext

Sat, 13 Jan 2024 13:38:08 -0500

I watched No Boilerplate’s video on plaintext and thought I should seriously apply those principles to my projects.

I was already veering that way with the creation of this website and teaching myself cool markdown tricks. Beginning work again also necessitates this change, I need to document my code while minimizing the time spent fussing with note-taking software.

Some things I’ve done this week with markdown

Move documentation and admin of my video game off of Jira and Confluence
Began using repo wiki feature for this website (which is great because I would otherwise drown the blog page in website updates)
Began documenting my workflow at my job

markdown isn’t a panacea, I’m helping my dad create a printed study aid for his students and I will probably have to use LaTeX. To my knowledge markdown does not have robust math features.

porcelain cups

Sat, 06 Jan 2024 06:47:56 -0500

“What use is a cup that doesn’t hold water?”

I broke a tea cup over a year ago. It was part of a set my friend gifted me for Christmas. I already had too many cups and could suffer its absence on my shelf. Yet, I kept it on my dresser in seven pieces for over a year.

January 1st arrived, as it did the previous year. This year I took the pieces of the tea cup and painted all the fractures gold, gluing the pieces together afterwards. Mending my broken tea cup didn’t occur to me last New Year’s, but it should have.

5 levels of minecraft server

Wed, 27 Dec 2023 02:08:59 -0500

I’ve played minecraft for 10 years and always needed to host minecraft servers for my friends. At first, the servers were kind of primitive. Now, they are more sophisticated.

I believe that hosting servers was influential in guiding me towards my studies in system adminstration and cybersecurity. Minecraft was a practical, approachable, subject I could work on as an inexperienced teenager.

Share on LAN & Private Tunnel

Before we knew how to make a server, my friends and I would use a VPN service like LogMeIn Hamachi to access eachothers’ networks. One of us would open our Minecraft game to LAN, allowing everyone else to join.

pilot

Tue, 26 Dec 2023 16:29:13 -0500

It lives!

I rewrote this website using Jekyll static site generator. Manually configuring my navbar on all pages was getting tiring.

The purpose of this blog is to detail my experiences in tech, art, and writing.

Points of interest with website creation:

I wanted the user to know what page they’re on from the navbar. My old website had this configured manually. The active page had an “active” class which would determine its css rules. This approach was not possible with Jekyll since the webpages are built programmatically. Instead, I had to go through the Liquid syntax and check if the nav element url was the same as the page’s url. This was accomplished as follows: